Visualizing the News

At the Future of Civic Media conference
at the MIT Media Lab in June, one of the best presentations came from
the co-creator of Many Eyes.

Fernanda B. Viegas, research staff member of IBM’s Visual
Communication Lab in Cambridge, described some of the uses for this visualization tool. For example, during the Congressional testimony of then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, a visualization Word Map graphically showed how often he used the phrases "I don’t know" and "I don’t recall."

Here’s a dataset I just uploaded to ManyEyes on civic engagement and mobile media. You can see it as a tag cloud, as a word tree, or in other ways.

Eleven days ago on this blog, Paul Lamb described a similar visualization tool: Wordle. With a little imagination, one can think of a variety of classroom settings and online news applications for these tools. Both a word tree and a tag cloud can help lead online readers through reports and complex, in-depth series.